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 Community Radio 855am

THE RADIO-ACTIVE SHOW

With Eric Miller and Linda Marks

Saturday at 10.00am

17th April 1999

Hello and welcome to the Radioactive Show brought to you by the Sustainable Energy and Anti-Uranium Service. I’m Linda Marks. The Radioactive Show is a weekly program bringing you news and information on Nuclear, Peace and Energy issues.

On today’s show we hear from Mary Olson of the Nuclear Information Resource Service in Washington DC speaking on Nuclear Power and Nuclear Waste.

Mary Olson has been working on the American ‘Mobile Chernobyl’ Bill that would allow the nuclear industry in America to move high level nuclear waste from reactors around America to Yucca Mountain in Nevada. That bill has been deferred. She was in Australia recently to speak at the ‘Radioactive Alert’ Symposium organised by Dr Helen Caldicott in the Old Parliament House on March 19 & 20th, also to work with anti-nuclear groups in Australia.

Mary Olson: Thankyou, Helen and thankyou for my opportunity to be here. It’s a real honour. I want to start out by saying, ‘David Pence, you can forget Pangea. David Pence and the Pangea gang, boy, have you blown it! I am in a roomful of such incredible and world-class nuke-busters that I heard speak yesterday and had dinner with last night, that they can just hang it up right now! But seriously, we know it will be a long fight and that’s what I’m really here to talk about.

Nuclear Information and Resource Service, the group that I work for was founded 20 years ago when in the United States there were over 400 reactors either on-line, under construction or on order. In the last 20 years they’ve only managed to build about ¼ of those. So we’ve claimed a ¾ victory before we start. In the last 9 years that I’ve been associated with the organisation we have closed 9 reactors. And so we are picking them off! We intend to help you with those Lucas Heights issues too.

So there is good news and bad news and they happen to be the same news. The bad news is that you are in the way of the Nuclear Mafia. They want to put the end of the nuclear fuel chain here in Australia. They want to make a nuclear toilet here. It is will be the ultimate ‘Mobile Chernobyl’ if we have high level nuclear waste and plutonium travelling to the Southern Hemisphere. They call that the end of the nuclear fuel chain.

But the good news is the same news because they have blown it. It is not a small world, it’s a big family. They have made this an international issue and we are going to get to know each other and we are going to work together and we are going to end the nuclear fuel chain. They have really blown it because the keys are here! The keys are here in human beings and hearts and communities, in the mining that’s been going on opposed here and will continue to be opposed. And Pangea is the key to being able to stop all the other issues you are facing here, I believe, because it is the big stick. People in your communities, in your cities across this continent are going to hear that you are targeted to be the nuclear toilet of the planet. And I think it is going to be the possibility to stop it all here. And that’s going to help turn it around globally. So the good news and the bad news are the same thing. I know I may sound like a ‘know-it-all’ American. I’m sorry, I have a small amount of time. You are just going to have to listen passed that, forgive me and listen to what I have to say.

The reason that all this is happening is because we have fought hard and we have won. Really! The nuclear cartel has its back to the wall, globally. It has been 25 years since there has been an order for a nuclear power reactor in the United States. Nuclear power in the United States is a complete economic failure. We don’t talk about nuclear reactors any more, we talk about stranded costs of utility corporations and it’s mounted up to 600 billion dollars. And I’ll tell you a little more about that, but it’s a complete economic failure, nuclear power, unless it’s subsidised by tax basis. The World Bank has said it’s not economic. Wall Street ‘D’ rated all the utilities in the 1990s so they are no longer premium investments in the United States. Sweden and Germany have pledged to phase out nuclear power. 50% of even the French people say no new nuclear reactors in France. In Japan the Monju reactor had a major accident that has pretty much killed the breeder program there and tide is turning even in Japan. Wonderful people, including my friend Rachael Weston stropped the Nyrex site in England. And we have BNFL knocking on your door because they have been shut out in England. And even the Asian financial crisis, as awful as it is, is going to help us because that was the new horizon for nuclear power. Well, guess what boys, it’s not economic in North America, it’s not economic in Europe and it sure as hell isn’t going to be economic in Asia. So I’m very hopeful that it is going to come to a grinding halt in terms of expansion.

But I have to tell you. Just in the last 6 months, Wall Street leaders have gone on record on saying that the only barrier to adopting nuclear power as the saving grace for the global climate change issue is the waste problem. Enter Pangea! OK, that’s it! The waste problem! We know, already, that we do not have a credible approach to nuclear waste disposal at all. This stuff is on the planet and we don’t have a means to guarantee the isolation of this material from the environment. And until we have that, we can’t move it. We have to know that the transportation risks are going to be outweighed by the benefits of the movement. So that’s the basic crux that we are working with in the North American context, in the European context and internationally here.

But we have to stand back and say that we are dealing with nuclear supremacy and it does originate in the United States. It comes from the Manhattan Project. It comes from holding the world by the scruff of the neck and you-know-what. That’s what we are dealing with here. And we also know the answer to that and that is individual people and communities working with love and courage and truth, they can’t take that. And again and again we have won and I want to share with you the winning strategies.

Linda Marks: We are listening to Mary Olson from the Nuclear Information Resource Service in Washington DC. Mary says the reason Pangea wants to bring nuclear waste to Australia is because the anti-nuclear movement in the Northern Hemisphere is winning and we must stop them here as well because it is far too dangerous to move the waste. She is working with groups all over the Northern Hemisphere that don’t want nuclear waste moved anywhere until we stop producing it and there is some sort of agreed solution to the problem of how we store it.

Mary Olson: I think it is vital at every step of the way, that Pangea as an international program is portrayed as the doorway to nuclear expansion. And never allowed to stand as the answer to a previous problem. Never! We do not have a credible way to deal with that previous problem and it is only the disposal of this waste. It is not going to be one place for the waste. It is going to be one more place for the waste with thousands and thousands of nuclear waste sites in between as this material is transported globally. They are not going to relieve the Russian problem by bringing it down here to Australia while they are bringing in more fuel from Western Europe and Japan. Don’t for an instant think that this is a solution.

But what is the good news? There are a lot of people willing to fight this. I have just spent a week with people from Russia. People from the Socio-Ecological Union who were in my country doing plutonium issues and I’ve been in contact with other activists in Russia who are very geared up on nuclear issues, and I asked them what to say and they say, ‘Good on you, mate, we’re going to fight together.’ And I am here representing an organisation that works with over a thousand grass roots groups in the United States and they are willing to work very hard to say the waste should stay where it is until we know it is going to go somewhere better.

So I want to first cut to the chase and talk about what are we going to do together. The modus operendi of these corporations is to plan a nice long luxurious time frame for themselves, with plenty of up-front funding from corporations that can stand to lose it. Give them lots of short-term events, event horizons in your path and effectively wear you down over time, us over time. We have seen this again and again in the United States. And so we have to know that and we have to build that into our strategy. We have to claim this issue as ours. Go back to the end of the nuclear fuel chain and claim that we are going to end it. We have to make it fun, we have to make it sustainable, and we have to be sure to include the next generation because this fight is going to go into the third millenium.

I want to tell you now some of the things that have worked in the United States before I tell you about some of the fights we’ve had there. The first thing is we have to blow their cover. It is nuclear expansion. More waste, not less. Australia is a nuclear toilet if this happens. We have to stop the reactor here because this is a classic manoeuvre on the part of promoters. It was done in Canada, in Saskatchewan where they did not need reactors. They sited reactors there so the people there would own the waste problem. They would feel that they had a waste problem. So that when Saskatchewan is targeted for their possible international waste site, they will think it is their problem and they need to help solve it.

So stopping the reactor here is absolutely part and parcel to stopping Pangea. We have to stand up as individuals and communities and I think we have to work multi-dimensionally, not only from the brain of the experts who can speak clearly but with many different voices and with music and with heart and spirit and healing. And in that line are the environmental justice issues that transcend the economic ones. We heard very compelling words yesterday about that and certainly in the United States, it’s been the environmental justice issues that both could cut through to people’s hearts and also sadly sometimes give the type of cover that governments sometimes need to change their decisions in the past. You know, they have to have a fig leaf and it’s sad that environmental justice is only a fig leaf in the United States, but, hey, we’ll take whatever help we can get to get the government to change its mind.

And finally, well not finally, the flip side of the fig leaf is to make everything cost a whole lot. The nuclear waste transportation is Germany is the prime example of this. They were trying to move just a small number of containers a small distance, a couple of hundred miles, but they managed to get tens of thousands of people out and that caused the government to get tens of thousands of police out. It cost 100 million dollars. They’ve done this two or three times and finally the police union said, ‘We don’t want to take the dose! We don’t want to have our sports events cancelled because we don’t have adequate security to do those events at the same time.’ So they have halted all nuclear waste transport in Germany at the moment because 100 million dollars was just too much to spend. Transport however is the key. In the United States we say, ‘We all live in Nevada,’ because Nevada is the proposed high level nuclear waste site in the United States. One of the things we talked about yesterday was putting together a road show here in Australia. We have been doing that in the United States and it what made all the difference in Congress. We put an actual mock nuclear waste cask out on the road and let people interact with that and let people travel with it, both street musicians and theatre people but also experts. We’ve taken it to Capital Hill. We’ve taken it on the key transportation routes. It’s been very effective.

And finally, you’ve got to choose targets, and you have got to be merciless, and you have to make it politically impossible to support this proposal. It doesn’t happen fast but you have to start now.

Linda Marks: It was late last year that we in Australia became aware that a company called Pangea Resources Ltd was promoting Australia as an international high level nuclear waste dump.

Pangea is a wholly owned subsidiary of Golder Associates, an international employee-owned organisation of consulting engineers based in Seattle. Golder Associates have worked for many years on various nuclear waste disposal projects in the US, UK and Europe. Back to Mary Olson.

Mary Olsen: Golder Associates, I’m going to have to get to know better now but they are at the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada. It’s in the Great Basin, it’s about 60 – 70 miles north of Las Vegas, our fastest growing city in the States. And it’s also pretty much as far as you can get from all the reactors.

Initially the approach to high level nuclear waste in the US was that we would look around the whole country and we would look at the geology and we would find a suitable site for burial and deep geological burial is the law in the United States at the moment. However there was such a huge political process that took over that Nevada was sited purely on political basis. There were powerful members in Congress from the other states being Texas and Washington, they were the other two last runners, which were again politically chosen. That nobody at this point denies that this was a purely political siting process.

It’s Western Shoshone land and the Shoshone people don’t want this dump. Soon after that the state of Nevada realised that it didn’t want the dump either and passed a law against it. It’s a huge example of stupidity because of all of the areas of the United States, it is one of the most complex pieces of geology. It’s in the Great Basin, it’s in an area with 35 active earthquake fault lines. There are two fault lines that would run directly through where they want to put the waste. There have been over 600 quakes over 2.5 on the Richter Scale in the last 20 years and just in December we have been having a rash of quakes that were 4.and better, as high as 4.7. This site is constantly jiggling. What happens then is that the soft volcanic rock was the worst kind of rock that our Academy of Science suggested for nuclear waste disposal, has become fractured.

And this has led to a constant changing of the rules. And you can expect this. Pangea has got to stop before you get to this point because what they start doing is creating a shoehorn to get the rules to fit the site. OK? And what happened, what was understood was that the fractures would not contain the radioactive gases that would be released in the decay of the waste and that carbon 14 would be a significant dose globally. A Swede told me that his calculations were that 25,000 excess cancers due to Yucca Mountain Repository from the carbon 14 alone. So it was known and understood in the insider community that this was a problem. So what happened in 1992, which was 5 years after they had decided to focus only on this one site, they passed a law saying that this site would not have to meet the national disposal standards for nuclear waste. Instead there should be a standard written for this one site. Well, I was trained as a scientist. If you have a standard and you have a criteria and your site doesn’t meet that criteria, you reject the site. You don’t change the standard. So the same old, same old, OK?

In addition, however, those same fractures caused fast flow pathways for water. It’s a desert, right, you wouldn’t expect water, but many of you know that there’s water in the desert and indeed, water is very precious in the desert, and the water table is very deep, but the water travels very quickly from the surface down to the bottom. Bottom being ground water. At Yucca Mountain they are already disclosing that dilution in the ground water is the final barrier for isolation.

So in December there were 219 organisations including some here in Australia who signed onto a petition to the secretary of energy saying, ‘Under existing regulations, you have to disqualify this site.’ We’ve yet to hear the response.

I want to tell you the last one because it is priceless. The Shoshone People call this mountain ‘Serpent Swimming West.’ Now they are using global positioning satellites and tracers on the surface to look at what’s called crustal expansion. There is evidence that there is a magma pocket below Yucca Mountain, a hot rock body, you know, a molten rock body, and that it is moving up and indeed the mountain is moving west. So, here is yet another case of the indigenous wisdom that we don’t listen to as the dominant society. So I think that if we stand back we can look at 1993 when Pangea was brought into the scene and understand that these guys had a pretty good idea that Yucca Mountain wasn’t going to work. But I wasn’t aware in 1993 that they were getting Pangea together. So this was the wild card that I didn’t know about.

Linda Marks: We are listening to Mary Olson of the Nuclear Information Resource Service in Washington DC speaking at the Radioactive Alert Symposium at Old Parliament House in March. So the anti-nuclear movement around the world has backed the nuclear industry into corner and the corner is here in Australia. If you look around the world the nuclear industry is not in very good shape. Here is Mary Olson talking about nuclear economics, the greenhouse effect and the nuclear industry and how it is perceived environmentally in America.

Mary Olson: And we found that the reactor vessel was cracked and it was aging. All the reactors in the world are aging much more rapidly than expected. I just want to finish this part of the talk with a bit of the economics here. These huge complex systems were built with the assumptions that you would have a minimum of 40 years to pay off your original investment. Guess what? United States are not making it much passed 20 before these aging factors catch up and the capital investment that would be required is so huge they are not going it. That’s how we are closing them. Some of the problems are so integral that you couldn’t replace it. It would be like open heart transplant and you just couldn’t do it. So reactors are closing early because intense heat and radioactivity affects metal and the metal doesn’t hold up and it becomes brittle. If you have to suddenly cool the reactor core it could shatter. We are closing these reactors early before they have paid off their bills.

The other thing that is happening in the US, we are, quote, ‘opening,’ it’s a bullshit term, we are ‘opening’ the electricity markets so that supposedly there is going to be competition. But on Capital Hill you go round and everyone is talking about ‘stranded costs,’ ‘stranded costs.’ This is all the money they spent to build those reactors they haven’t recovered yet. It’s 600 Billion dollars! And they are cutting deals to make every electrical consumer from now on pay that money off in what’s called ‘a line charge.’ So it’s a total complete nuclear welfare scam.

Don’t ever buy the idea that nuclear is the answer to global warming. For every dollar spent on efficiency, you get 6 times the reduction in CO2 that you would out of nuclear. And I want to mention that uranium enrichment, the uranium from here gets sent to various places around the world. If you use gaseous diffusion like we do in the States it’s the single largest consumer in the States. One per cent, one hundredth of the electrical generation in the States goes to uranium enrichment and it’s total coal power plants that feed that electricity into those facilities as sole source. So any idea that nuclear is green house gas free is ludicrous. They say they give us 19% of our electricity, you have to take 1% off because if we stopped it all, they wouldn’t need that 1%.

The last thing I want to tell you is that we have been having some fun. We went to the Better Business Bureau, this is a trade council in the States. There is no legislative regulation of advertising, but there is this industry called the Better Business Bureau. We went there and said, ‘Look, the Nuclear Energy Institute (that is the lobby arm for the nuclear utilities), they are claiming that nuclear power is clean and does not pollute the environment and this is false and they shouldn’t be allowed to do it.’ And we won. It was the first time that the Better Business Bureau ruled on anything that didn’t have to do with defaming a competitor’s product. So, you know, we’re on it, we’re going to keep going on it.

Linda Marks: We were listening to Mary Olson from the Nuclear Information Resource Service in Washington DC and the music played during Mary’s presentation was ‘Radiation On My Windshield’ sung by Joanne Ran. That’s all the time we have for the Radioactive Show this week, listen in again next week.

Transcript produced by Linda Marks - with much thanks!!!
Page last updated May 28, 1999.
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